The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word

Charles Goodrich retired in 2017 as director for the Spring Creek Project, an independent funded program based in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University.

The challenge of the Spring Creek Project is to bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophical analysis, and the creative, expressive power of the written word, to find new ways to understand and re-imagine our relation to the natural world. Spring Creek’s website: http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu

The Spring Creek Project organizes creative gatherings of people in public places to imagine new ways of thinking about, and thus acting in, the world. Spring Creek-sponsored events have included everything from informal conversations between poets, philosophers, and scientists to nationally recognized weekend symposia, from theatre and musical performances to writing workshops to field trips.

Long-Term Ecological Reflections: 2003 - 2203 In a program that will continue for two hundred years, writers visit sites in the forest to create an ongoing record of their reflections on the relation of people and forests changing together over time.

Long-Term Ecological Reflections is a collaboration between the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word, a program in the Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University and the Andrews Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program; and the Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service.

In all of our programs, writers are encouraged to visit designated study sites for reflecting on and writing about the forest and their relation to it. These writings, which will form a collection spanning hundreds of years, will be gathered in permanent archives at Oregon State University, and are accessible via the web-based Forest Log.